How easy is it to get it running well with nothing but a remote control?
I thought that most of the value-add of something like MythBuntu was making sure all the right drivers are there for hardware acceleration (on a low-power board that can only hardware decode), that lirc and such works completely out of the box, mythtv starts on boot full screen, and so on.
Sure, you can run mythtv from a X11 session trivially from any linux desktop distro. The challenge is making it work in your living room without a lot of fussing around.
Agree. The 1/100k car enthusiast who rips apart his car and replaces all the computers inside isn't really the source of our problems. You might as well outlaw wrenches if you want to stop that sort of thing.
That really ought to read "Down the line, wearables also could help pharmaceutical makers prove to insurance companies that their treatments are effective, thus increasing healthcare profits."
Big Pharma companies don't profit from "health," they profit from "care."
Sure, but if they don't show that they deliver the former, people will be reluctant to pay for the latter.
It is still a big problem, but I'd say that drugs are actually far better off than the rest of healthcare. How much clinical evidence do you think there is for half the advice your doctor charged you $80 to give the last time you visited him? The pills are actually some of the better-tested stuff on the healthcare market.
I have no problem with reasonable insurance requirements for drivers. That really applies across the board, but probably moreso for commercial operators.
However, you need to keep the requirements reasonable, and of course allow self-insurance. If Uber has a better way of managing its drivers/etc and ensuring safer operations, and they can lower their insurance costs as a result, then they ought to be able to pass those savings on to customers. I am not in any way a supporter of the whole "independent contractor" theory where Uber keeps x% of the fare but if there is a crash they accept 0% of the liability. But, that is a principle I apply everywhere - if it were up to me then if you went to Memorial Hospital for a procedure then it would be illegal to get more than one bill for the procedure and it had better come from Memorial Hospital, and if anything goes wrong Memorial Hospital pays for it and they can make the argument about liability with their subcontractors themselves. Of course, if it were up to me you probably wouldn't get a bill in the first place, but whatever...
I'll agree that surge pricing is more likely to affect supply when it is predictable (which still makes it useful). During unpredictable spikes it actually can help out on the demand side. If I have 3 choices of how to get from point A to B, and one of those choices triples in cost, then I'm less likely to use it. Maybe somebody else doesn't have 3 choices, and they benefit from my not leaving a subway seat empty to use Uber.
Most commuter train systems have peak timing. In the US examples I can think off offhand include New York, DC, and Philadelphia.
Besides the peak/off-peak fare, there are often fare discount programs only available off-peak (like disabled/senior fares, or family deals). Also, in many cities and transit systems parking may be cheaper or free on weekends, which is an off-peak time.
The idea is to try to shift usage to off-peak times so that the use of the system is more balanced, which makes it far more economical to run. Kind of like a taxi service.
Charging less would just mean that he'd have to leave earlier for work to get there on time, since in addition to the million people already using the system there would be another 500k people taking the train at 8 when they don't need to. It would also mean that fares would need to be raised across-the-board to maintain the same funding for the system.
It isn't like public transit operations are huge profit centers.
I don't have any problem with making Taxi services operate like Uber. The idea of the only record of a ride being something scribbled on a piece of paper that the driver can tamper with is ridiculous.
The Taxi model made sense back before it was easy to track all your cars and passengers in realtime. The problem is that we're still trying to make it work that way today.
Transportation can be vital to maintaining a job or caring for kids - it can also be a luxury. I can see an argument either way.
The thing is that demand for transportation isn't constant.
I need to go to the store sometime today. I can go at 8AM, or I can go at 10AM. If I go at 8AM I'm competing for transportation resources with all the folks trying to get to work. If I go at 10AM then I'm employing a driver who otherwise would probably bit sitting around unpaid.
If it costs me the same either way I'll go whenever I think it is most convenient for me. If I have to pay more for the trip at 8AM, I end up doing what is more convenient for everybody else. How is this not a win-win?
Because that is what decent people do in times of need.
Sounds great. So the 1% of the population with means who are decent chipped in and helped.
Wouldn't it be better if the other 99% of the population with means who aren't so decent also chipped in and helped? Or is it better to stand up for principles and watch people die?
There is no reason for doctors not to charge more for prime time appointments. Why not charge people less on a weekday? Then people who can't go to the doctor on a weekday don't have to book six months out to get a weekend slot. Some people have flexibility, and others don't. When you charge everybody the same then it becomes more about who books the appointment first and less about who needs the appointment more.
Are you slow? Increasing prices doesn't magically create sufficient extra drivers to cope with high demand. Economics 101 is not a sufficiently detailed analysis of how real life works.
Increasing prices has two effects:
1. It actually DOES create extra drivers. Maybe I'm a driver and it is my day off. I notice that the going fare is triple the normal rate, so I tell my wife I'll take her out to dinner tomorrow and hop in my car. More passengers get driven, and I get paid more. Win-win.
2. It also reduces demand. Maybe one of those passengers wants to run to the grocery store, but doesn't care if they do it today or tomorrow. So, they just do it tomorrow. Meanwhile, the guy who is stuck at the airport trying to get to where he is going has one less person in line ahead of him.
When you cap prices you tend to get lines. If I were given the choice of waiting in a 2 hour line for a $10 cab ride, or having a $20 cab ride RIGHT NOW, chances are I'd opt for the latter. Or, maybe I'm hungry and will have to eat dinner either before I leave or after I arrive, so I just go grab dinner now to save $10 and now there's one less person in line.
Pricing is really about information. It helps people make better decisions about allocating resources. Even if not a single extra driver started driving surge pricing would help people plan their trips such that demand is more even.
Gravity and road wear are fairly constant forces (well, road wear is higher for bigger vehicles, and surprise, states usually tax trucks more as a result).
Public transit usually has peak and off-peak rates. The idea is that if you don't care when you make the trip, then you tend to save money by doing it off-peak. Then you're one less body on the standing-room-only train.
Many argue for electric rates to be demand-based so that people will conserve electricity during peak hours, or deploy solar/etc. It doesn't cost the same per-unit amount to produce 10x baseline power as 1x baseline power, so why should people pay the same.
And the same is true for taxi services. It doesn't cost the same per-unit to service 10x the usual demand as 1x the usual demand. At the normal rate many drivers would prefer to not deal with lots of crowds or work on their planned day off. If they're offered higher pay, they are more likely to elect to service the higher demand.
With 4 or more cores in every computer it's pretty rare for the CPU to be a bottleneck these days. In fact it's been rare for the CPU to be a bottleneck for the last 20 years.
Tend to agree. I think the attractiveness of swap, RAM compression, add more RAM, and add more CPU tends to go back and forth as the relative cost/speed/utilization of these various resources changes. When RAM is cheaper than CPU, you want to add RAM. When CPU is cheaper than RAM, you want to use faster compression routines. When you can have your swap across 3 SSDs then maybe you swap.
Or, just put 8+GB of RAM in your machine and do away with pagefiles altogether. Seriously, I didn't notice any performance impact with Premiere Pro when I turned off the Windows pagefile.
Which makes more sense? Buying more of your fully-utilized RAM, or installing a device driver that uses a few percent of your 10% utilized CPU to make that unnecessary?
If you're CPU-bound then adding RAM compression is a bad idea. If you're RAM-bound it makes a lot of sense.
Sure, you could add more RAM, but maybe you'll get more bang for the buck if you add more CPU instead. Or if you go out to dinner.
Bitcoin proponents like to talk about how Bitcoin provides an alternative to regular monetary transfers. So let's say it catches on: all transactions which are currently done in regular currency are now done in Bitcoin. Are you really suggesting that 7 transactions per second is sufficient to handle the global economy?
No argument there. Bitcoin is sometimes touted as a micro-transaction system, but in reality it isn't really scalable even as a macro-transaction system.
I could see how it could evolve into some kind of large-scale currency exchange/basis/reserve system that other more scalable micro-transaction systems become based on. So, bitcoin controls the overall supply of currency but all the day-to-day happens elsewhere. I'm not sure how that would even work.
However, the idea of the average person doing average transactions in bitcoins just can't work with the current design.
The distributed nature of the system also can't handle simply increasing the supported transaction rate. You can do it, but eventually you need to be the size of Visa to handle all the transactions.
The distribution of bitcoin isn't about splitting up storage of transactions across many parties. The distribution in bitcoin requires every party to have a copy of every transaction. That obviously created fundamental scaling issues.
Part of me wonders if the right solution is to increase block size, or to increase block rate. If the effort and reward for blocks were reduced, then you'd have less time between blocks, which still gets you a higher transaction rate, but it also gets you less latency.
What I don't understand is the relative impact on communications, processing, and storage of all those blocks.
There is a bit of a fundamental limitation on the nature of bitcoin. Right now the whole model of bitcoin relies on clients maintaining a full history of the entire blockchain. That is a bit like saying that to process Visa transactions you need to maintain a record of every Visa transaction that was ever performed since the beginning of Visa, and maintain it in realtime. Ie, to use Visa you have to be Visa.
That is going to be a big limitation on mainstream adoption of bitcoin.
If you read the ARS article on this, you would see that:
"In responses to FCC investigators, Smart City later revealed it "automatically transmitted deauthentication frames to prevent Wi-Fi users whose devices produced a received signal strength above a present power level at Smart City access points from establishing or maintaining a Wi-Fi network independent of Smart City's network," according to a consent decree filed in the case."
Well, hopefully the FCC's case puts an end to these practices.
Otherwise I could see somebody writing an app for any device whose wifi can be put in monitoring mode that just sends a de-auth frame for any Smart City connection it spots anywhere. Then nobody has wifi at their conferences and they go out of business.
That is certainly possible, but I suspect it isn't the case.
In order to get something to you there are a few steps: 1. They have to have it in inventory. 2. They have to package and ship the item out. 3. The courier has to deliver it.
#3 should be the same for everybody, though I'm sure Amazon can negotiate lower rates on the basis of volume and integration (it isn't like the guy at Amazon picks up the phone and calls UPS to ask for a pickup, etc). Also, Amazon can save money by keeping lots of metrics on delivery times. If the USPS gets stuff from zip code 1 to zip code 2 in 2 days 99% of the time, then they can sell that as 2-day shipping and bribe the customers with incentives anytime there is a miss, rather than paying 2x as much for guaranteed 2-day shipping from somebody else (which also has some failure rate anyway).
A large hardware chain could probably achieve #1, but whether they do is debatable. You'd be amazed at how poor big companies can be at inventory management, and historically this has caused many a company's ruin. Walmart killed KMart and everybody else largely on the basis of really well-managed inventory. Dell nearly killed just about everybody else back in the day because of just-in-time inventory management for rapidly-depreciating assets like CPUs (you can't buy a $500 CPU and then take a month to sell it when your competitor just buys it a month later for $400).
However, I think #2 is the real killer. Sears and Amazon may very well have the same product available in their warehouses. However, with Amazon after you click the button they may very well have a robot with the item heading to the packing line in 15 minutes, with the shipment data already transmitted electronically to their carrier. They are extremely efficient at getting stuff out the door. An item that somebody wants to buy and which is sitting on your shelf is just a waste of space and money, and customer satisfaction as well.
In my experience that is where most companies fail. With Amazon if I buy with 2-day shipping the thing is out the door same day before 5PM or whatever (and that cutoff is very late in the day compared to many competitors). With Amazon 2-day means that I have the item in 2-days. With most other big vendors if I buy with 2-day shipping it often means that they take 3-4 days to ship the thing out, and then it arrives 2 days later. So, I'm paying that premium on shipping just to watch the vendor fumble around with my order, and I never really am sure about when it will arrive.
Amazon is pretty ruthless on this stuff, and IMHO their practices are so ruthless they border on human-rights violations in their actual warehouses. However, even if they cleaned that stuff up they'd still be way cheaper and faster than just about anybody else. Companies that want to compete have to invest a lot more in streamlined processes, because customers aren't going to pay for mail-order that takes a week to arrive.
You can pay to get real-time data (or as close to it as possible in your location and the speed of the infrastructure).
Isn't that a bit like Walmart displaying yesterday's prices on the store shelves and on their advertising, and you find out what your real bill is after you hand them your credit card? But, for a modest fee they'll show you today's prices instead?
I get that commodity prices change in realtime. I don't propose that when you are quoted a price that it be valid for a day or anything like that. However, I see no reason that anybody shouldn't just be able to see what the price of a commodity is at any time, accurate to the time at which the price leaves the webserver or whatever.
HFT has reduced the total arbitrage, decreased market to market differences and provides a massive liquidity boost to the entire market.
The problem is that none of these are useful services on the scale that HFT does them.
If I got to sell a stock and have it sold in 10 seconds, I'm pretty happy. Market makers and such which make that possible do provide a useful service to the economy, versus me having to sit on my order for three days until somebody else notices it.
On the other hand, being able to sell it in femptoseconds instead of microseconds doesn't add real value. It just becomes a pay-to-win scenario.
Likewise, keeping international markets in sync so that the price isn't $5 in NYC and $10 in Tokyo is a useful service. On the other hand, ensuring that when the price goes up by 0.01 in NYC that the price goes up in Tokyo by 0.01 within microseconds of the speed-of-light travel time isn't a useful service. It just doesn't have to be that close.
What's the difference? The way you challenge a law is by acting as if the law doesn't apply.
No, the way you challenge a law is by arguing that the law doesn't/shouldn't apply to anybody
That doesn't make any sense. Why would you regulate a corporate-run service that vets its drivers and passengers with centralized realtime tracking in the same way as a bazillion completely independent taxi companies that keep all their records in the car and rely on the drivers for accurate recordkeeping?
I think the ultimate end-game is a set of different regulations that do apply to everybody, so that taxis and Uber run under the same rules. I don't have a problem with independent taxi companies doing things the uber way as long as they're large enough to have skin in the game (ie every car isn't owned by a separate holding company or whatever), and continuously track their driver performance and have realtime monitoring of cars and who is in them (both the drivers and the passengers). That is what Uber is doing, and that is why people want to use Uber.
People think this is about saving money/etc. Sure, on some runs with flat fees or whatever or when the driver is gaming the route that might be the case. However, I think most people would rather deal with a big company that has one big reputation to protect than a random cab company that really doesn't care what you think of them since you'll probably never see them again. When I travel I use Uber in multiple cities, and it is the same brand. If one of their cab drivers kills somebody, their entire international business will suffer. They have incentive to police themselves. The same is not true of "Lucky Cab Holding Co" in NYC that owns a single medallion.
It is no different from hiring a plumber. I can hire a local guy and save $50, or I can call a national chain and know that if I complain I'll probably get taken care of. There isn't anything wrong with having both models, but with taxis to date operating 100% under the "local guy" model it shouldn't be a surprise that there is demand for something different.
And I'm not convinced that Uber will ever take over 100%. I'm sure they'll reach some kind of market share balance with traditional cabs. After all, if I am at the train station there will be a line of cabs waiting, and Uber might be 10min away. Both models have some advantages.
Is it possible to fashion an 'EMP gun' to at least direct the majority of the pulse at a target? Maybe just a jammer to interrupt either the GPS signal (or more likely) the remote control signal. Have to add it to the guard tower arsenals.
It actually is a lot harder than you think.
EMP has to be REALLY powerful to do something like fry circuits, and you can imagine the havoc that could cause in general (that drone is far away, lots of other computers are a lot closer even if not being aimed at). I don't know how long-range you can even direct EMP generated using conventional means - the stuff that wipes out cities is basically a byproduct of a nuclear explosion (as far as I understand it this is basically just synchrotron radiation from ionized air).
A GPS jammer is also hard to do since there is a simple countermeasure - put foil around the underside of the drone. The GPS satellites are above the drone, your jammer is below the drone. Your jammer is also going to cause a lot of problems with GPS systems all over the place.
Next step - drone drops cutters to cut through the nets, or something to burn them. How long before people start sticking guns on drones to take pot shots at the guards? If done from enough altitude so that the drone or muzzle flash isn't easily spotted the thing is going to be invincible to anything short of radar-guided AAA (which might just be radar-driven shotguns, but still).
Slashdot Mirror
How easy is it to get it running well with nothing but a remote control?
I thought that most of the value-add of something like MythBuntu was making sure all the right drivers are there for hardware acceleration (on a low-power board that can only hardware decode), that lirc and such works completely out of the box, mythtv starts on boot full screen, and so on.
Sure, you can run mythtv from a X11 session trivially from any linux desktop distro. The challenge is making it work in your living room without a lot of fussing around.
Agree. The 1/100k car enthusiast who rips apart his car and replaces all the computers inside isn't really the source of our problems. You might as well outlaw wrenches if you want to stop that sort of thing.
That really ought to read "Down the line, wearables also could help pharmaceutical makers prove to insurance companies that their treatments are effective, thus increasing healthcare profits."
Big Pharma companies don't profit from "health," they profit from "care."
Sure, but if they don't show that they deliver the former, people will be reluctant to pay for the latter.
It is still a big problem, but I'd say that drugs are actually far better off than the rest of healthcare. How much clinical evidence do you think there is for half the advice your doctor charged you $80 to give the last time you visited him? The pills are actually some of the better-tested stuff on the healthcare market.
I have no problem with reasonable insurance requirements for drivers. That really applies across the board, but probably moreso for commercial operators.
However, you need to keep the requirements reasonable, and of course allow self-insurance. If Uber has a better way of managing its drivers/etc and ensuring safer operations, and they can lower their insurance costs as a result, then they ought to be able to pass those savings on to customers. I am not in any way a supporter of the whole "independent contractor" theory where Uber keeps x% of the fare but if there is a crash they accept 0% of the liability. But, that is a principle I apply everywhere - if it were up to me then if you went to Memorial Hospital for a procedure then it would be illegal to get more than one bill for the procedure and it had better come from Memorial Hospital, and if anything goes wrong Memorial Hospital pays for it and they can make the argument about liability with their subcontractors themselves. Of course, if it were up to me you probably wouldn't get a bill in the first place, but whatever...
I'll agree that surge pricing is more likely to affect supply when it is predictable (which still makes it useful). During unpredictable spikes it actually can help out on the demand side. If I have 3 choices of how to get from point A to B, and one of those choices triples in cost, then I'm less likely to use it. Maybe somebody else doesn't have 3 choices, and they benefit from my not leaving a subway seat empty to use Uber.
Most commuter train systems have peak timing. In the US examples I can think off offhand include New York, DC, and Philadelphia.
Besides the peak/off-peak fare, there are often fare discount programs only available off-peak (like disabled/senior fares, or family deals). Also, in many cities and transit systems parking may be cheaper or free on weekends, which is an off-peak time.
The idea is to try to shift usage to off-peak times so that the use of the system is more balanced, which makes it far more economical to run. Kind of like a taxi service.
Charging less would just mean that he'd have to leave earlier for work to get there on time, since in addition to the million people already using the system there would be another 500k people taking the train at 8 when they don't need to. It would also mean that fares would need to be raised across-the-board to maintain the same funding for the system.
It isn't like public transit operations are huge profit centers.
I don't have any problem with making Taxi services operate like Uber. The idea of the only record of a ride being something scribbled on a piece of paper that the driver can tamper with is ridiculous.
The Taxi model made sense back before it was easy to track all your cars and passengers in realtime. The problem is that we're still trying to make it work that way today.
Transportation can be vital to maintaining a job or caring for kids - it can also be a luxury. I can see an argument either way.
The thing is that demand for transportation isn't constant.
I need to go to the store sometime today. I can go at 8AM, or I can go at 10AM. If I go at 8AM I'm competing for transportation resources with all the folks trying to get to work. If I go at 10AM then I'm employing a driver who otherwise would probably bit sitting around unpaid.
If it costs me the same either way I'll go whenever I think it is most convenient for me. If I have to pay more for the trip at 8AM, I end up doing what is more convenient for everybody else. How is this not a win-win?
Because that is what decent people do in times of need.
Sounds great. So the 1% of the population with means who are decent chipped in and helped.
Wouldn't it be better if the other 99% of the population with means who aren't so decent also chipped in and helped? Or is it better to stand up for principles and watch people die?
There is no reason for doctors not to charge more for prime time appointments. Why not charge people less on a weekday? Then people who can't go to the doctor on a weekday don't have to book six months out to get a weekend slot. Some people have flexibility, and others don't. When you charge everybody the same then it becomes more about who books the appointment first and less about who needs the appointment more.
Are you slow? Increasing prices doesn't magically create sufficient extra drivers to cope with high demand. Economics 101 is not a sufficiently detailed analysis of how real life works.
Increasing prices has two effects:
1. It actually DOES create extra drivers. Maybe I'm a driver and it is my day off. I notice that the going fare is triple the normal rate, so I tell my wife I'll take her out to dinner tomorrow and hop in my car. More passengers get driven, and I get paid more. Win-win.
2. It also reduces demand. Maybe one of those passengers wants to run to the grocery store, but doesn't care if they do it today or tomorrow. So, they just do it tomorrow. Meanwhile, the guy who is stuck at the airport trying to get to where he is going has one less person in line ahead of him.
When you cap prices you tend to get lines. If I were given the choice of waiting in a 2 hour line for a $10 cab ride, or having a $20 cab ride RIGHT NOW, chances are I'd opt for the latter. Or, maybe I'm hungry and will have to eat dinner either before I leave or after I arrive, so I just go grab dinner now to save $10 and now there's one less person in line.
Pricing is really about information. It helps people make better decisions about allocating resources. Even if not a single extra driver started driving surge pricing would help people plan their trips such that demand is more even.
Gravity and road wear are fairly constant forces (well, road wear is higher for bigger vehicles, and surprise, states usually tax trucks more as a result).
Public transit usually has peak and off-peak rates. The idea is that if you don't care when you make the trip, then you tend to save money by doing it off-peak. Then you're one less body on the standing-room-only train.
Many argue for electric rates to be demand-based so that people will conserve electricity during peak hours, or deploy solar/etc. It doesn't cost the same per-unit amount to produce 10x baseline power as 1x baseline power, so why should people pay the same.
And the same is true for taxi services. It doesn't cost the same per-unit to service 10x the usual demand as 1x the usual demand. At the normal rate many drivers would prefer to not deal with lots of crowds or work on their planned day off. If they're offered higher pay, they are more likely to elect to service the higher demand.
With 4 or more cores in every computer it's pretty rare for the CPU to be a bottleneck these days. In fact it's been rare for the CPU to be a bottleneck for the last 20 years.
Tend to agree. I think the attractiveness of swap, RAM compression, add more RAM, and add more CPU tends to go back and forth as the relative cost/speed/utilization of these various resources changes. When RAM is cheaper than CPU, you want to add RAM. When CPU is cheaper than RAM, you want to use faster compression routines. When you can have your swap across 3 SSDs then maybe you swap.
Or, just put 8+GB of RAM in your machine and do away with pagefiles altogether. Seriously, I didn't notice any performance impact with Premiere Pro when I turned off the Windows pagefile.
Which makes more sense? Buying more of your fully-utilized RAM, or installing a device driver that uses a few percent of your 10% utilized CPU to make that unnecessary?
If you're CPU-bound then adding RAM compression is a bad idea. If you're RAM-bound it makes a lot of sense.
Sure, you could add more RAM, but maybe you'll get more bang for the buck if you add more CPU instead. Or if you go out to dinner.
Bitcoin proponents like to talk about how Bitcoin provides an alternative to regular monetary transfers. So let's say it catches on: all transactions which are currently done in regular currency are now done in Bitcoin. Are you really suggesting that 7 transactions per second is sufficient to handle the global economy?
No argument there. Bitcoin is sometimes touted as a micro-transaction system, but in reality it isn't really scalable even as a macro-transaction system.
I could see how it could evolve into some kind of large-scale currency exchange/basis/reserve system that other more scalable micro-transaction systems become based on. So, bitcoin controls the overall supply of currency but all the day-to-day happens elsewhere. I'm not sure how that would even work.
However, the idea of the average person doing average transactions in bitcoins just can't work with the current design.
The distributed nature of the system also can't handle simply increasing the supported transaction rate. You can do it, but eventually you need to be the size of Visa to handle all the transactions.
The distribution of bitcoin isn't about splitting up storage of transactions across many parties. The distribution in bitcoin requires every party to have a copy of every transaction. That obviously created fundamental scaling issues.
Part of me wonders if the right solution is to increase block size, or to increase block rate. If the effort and reward for blocks were reduced, then you'd have less time between blocks, which still gets you a higher transaction rate, but it also gets you less latency.
What I don't understand is the relative impact on communications, processing, and storage of all those blocks.
There is a bit of a fundamental limitation on the nature of bitcoin. Right now the whole model of bitcoin relies on clients maintaining a full history of the entire blockchain. That is a bit like saying that to process Visa transactions you need to maintain a record of every Visa transaction that was ever performed since the beginning of Visa, and maintain it in realtime. Ie, to use Visa you have to be Visa.
That is going to be a big limitation on mainstream adoption of bitcoin.
If you read the ARS article on this, you would see that:
"In responses to FCC investigators, Smart City later revealed it "automatically transmitted deauthentication frames to prevent Wi-Fi users whose devices produced a received signal strength above a present power level at Smart City access points from establishing or maintaining a Wi-Fi network independent of Smart City's network," according to a consent decree filed in the case."
Well, hopefully the FCC's case puts an end to these practices.
Otherwise I could see somebody writing an app for any device whose wifi can be put in monitoring mode that just sends a de-auth frame for any Smart City connection it spots anywhere. Then nobody has wifi at their conferences and they go out of business.
That is certainly possible, but I suspect it isn't the case.
In order to get something to you there are a few steps:
1. They have to have it in inventory.
2. They have to package and ship the item out.
3. The courier has to deliver it.
#3 should be the same for everybody, though I'm sure Amazon can negotiate lower rates on the basis of volume and integration (it isn't like the guy at Amazon picks up the phone and calls UPS to ask for a pickup, etc). Also, Amazon can save money by keeping lots of metrics on delivery times. If the USPS gets stuff from zip code 1 to zip code 2 in 2 days 99% of the time, then they can sell that as 2-day shipping and bribe the customers with incentives anytime there is a miss, rather than paying 2x as much for guaranteed 2-day shipping from somebody else (which also has some failure rate anyway).
A large hardware chain could probably achieve #1, but whether they do is debatable. You'd be amazed at how poor big companies can be at inventory management, and historically this has caused many a company's ruin. Walmart killed KMart and everybody else largely on the basis of really well-managed inventory. Dell nearly killed just about everybody else back in the day because of just-in-time inventory management for rapidly-depreciating assets like CPUs (you can't buy a $500 CPU and then take a month to sell it when your competitor just buys it a month later for $400).
However, I think #2 is the real killer. Sears and Amazon may very well have the same product available in their warehouses. However, with Amazon after you click the button they may very well have a robot with the item heading to the packing line in 15 minutes, with the shipment data already transmitted electronically to their carrier. They are extremely efficient at getting stuff out the door. An item that somebody wants to buy and which is sitting on your shelf is just a waste of space and money, and customer satisfaction as well.
In my experience that is where most companies fail. With Amazon if I buy with 2-day shipping the thing is out the door same day before 5PM or whatever (and that cutoff is very late in the day compared to many competitors). With Amazon 2-day means that I have the item in 2-days. With most other big vendors if I buy with 2-day shipping it often means that they take 3-4 days to ship the thing out, and then it arrives 2 days later. So, I'm paying that premium on shipping just to watch the vendor fumble around with my order, and I never really am sure about when it will arrive.
Amazon is pretty ruthless on this stuff, and IMHO their practices are so ruthless they border on human-rights violations in their actual warehouses. However, even if they cleaned that stuff up they'd still be way cheaper and faster than just about anybody else. Companies that want to compete have to invest a lot more in streamlined processes, because customers aren't going to pay for mail-order that takes a week to arrive.
You can pay to get real-time data (or as close to it as possible in your location and the speed of the infrastructure).
Isn't that a bit like Walmart displaying yesterday's prices on the store shelves and on their advertising, and you find out what your real bill is after you hand them your credit card? But, for a modest fee they'll show you today's prices instead?
I get that commodity prices change in realtime. I don't propose that when you are quoted a price that it be valid for a day or anything like that. However, I see no reason that anybody shouldn't just be able to see what the price of a commodity is at any time, accurate to the time at which the price leaves the webserver or whatever.
HFT has reduced the total arbitrage, decreased market to market differences and provides a massive liquidity boost to the entire market.
The problem is that none of these are useful services on the scale that HFT does them.
If I got to sell a stock and have it sold in 10 seconds, I'm pretty happy. Market makers and such which make that possible do provide a useful service to the economy, versus me having to sit on my order for three days until somebody else notices it.
On the other hand, being able to sell it in femptoseconds instead of microseconds doesn't add real value. It just becomes a pay-to-win scenario.
Likewise, keeping international markets in sync so that the price isn't $5 in NYC and $10 in Tokyo is a useful service. On the other hand, ensuring that when the price goes up by 0.01 in NYC that the price goes up in Tokyo by 0.01 within microseconds of the speed-of-light travel time isn't a useful service. It just doesn't have to be that close.
What's the difference? The way you challenge a law is by acting as if the law doesn't apply.
No, the way you challenge a law is by arguing that the law doesn't/shouldn't apply to anybody
That doesn't make any sense. Why would you regulate a corporate-run service that vets its drivers and passengers with centralized realtime tracking in the same way as a bazillion completely independent taxi companies that keep all their records in the car and rely on the drivers for accurate recordkeeping?
I think the ultimate end-game is a set of different regulations that do apply to everybody, so that taxis and Uber run under the same rules. I don't have a problem with independent taxi companies doing things the uber way as long as they're large enough to have skin in the game (ie every car isn't owned by a separate holding company or whatever), and continuously track their driver performance and have realtime monitoring of cars and who is in them (both the drivers and the passengers). That is what Uber is doing, and that is why people want to use Uber.
People think this is about saving money/etc. Sure, on some runs with flat fees or whatever or when the driver is gaming the route that might be the case. However, I think most people would rather deal with a big company that has one big reputation to protect than a random cab company that really doesn't care what you think of them since you'll probably never see them again. When I travel I use Uber in multiple cities, and it is the same brand. If one of their cab drivers kills somebody, their entire international business will suffer. They have incentive to police themselves. The same is not true of "Lucky Cab Holding Co" in NYC that owns a single medallion.
It is no different from hiring a plumber. I can hire a local guy and save $50, or I can call a national chain and know that if I complain I'll probably get taken care of. There isn't anything wrong with having both models, but with taxis to date operating 100% under the "local guy" model it shouldn't be a surprise that there is demand for something different.
And I'm not convinced that Uber will ever take over 100%. I'm sure they'll reach some kind of market share balance with traditional cabs. After all, if I am at the train station there will be a line of cabs waiting, and Uber might be 10min away. Both models have some advantages.
Uber isn't challenging the laws though. Their primary defense is that the laws don't apply to them
What's the difference? The way you challenge a law is by acting as if the law doesn't apply.
Is it possible to fashion an 'EMP gun' to at least direct the majority of the pulse at a target? Maybe just a jammer to interrupt either the GPS signal (or more likely) the remote control signal. Have to add it to the guard tower arsenals.
It actually is a lot harder than you think.
EMP has to be REALLY powerful to do something like fry circuits, and you can imagine the havoc that could cause in general (that drone is far away, lots of other computers are a lot closer even if not being aimed at). I don't know how long-range you can even direct EMP generated using conventional means - the stuff that wipes out cities is basically a byproduct of a nuclear explosion (as far as I understand it this is basically just synchrotron radiation from ionized air).
A GPS jammer is also hard to do since there is a simple countermeasure - put foil around the underside of the drone. The GPS satellites are above the drone, your jammer is below the drone. Your jammer is also going to cause a lot of problems with GPS systems all over the place.
Next step - drone drops cutters to cut through the nets, or something to burn them. How long before people start sticking guns on drones to take pot shots at the guards? If done from enough altitude so that the drone or muzzle flash isn't easily spotted the thing is going to be invincible to anything short of radar-guided AAA (which might just be radar-driven shotguns, but still).